Keep your PC protected and clean – Free and easily.

As a user of both Macs and PC’s depending on what I am working on, I know that PC’s are naturally more susceptible to viruses and spyware than Macs. After all, it’s something that Justin Long has been rubbing in our faces against a white background on TV for years now. However, while this may be true, it is actually very easy to keep a PC protected and free of harmful infections using only a few free programs.

Here are the programs I use on both of my PC’s. As of now, neither machine has a single infection.

Spybot: Search & Destroy
Spybot is all anyone reallly needs to get rid of harmful spyware on their computers. As of yet, there hasn’t been an infected file Spybot hasn’t removed for me. Best of all, like all of these programs, it’s free. You can’t go wrong with that, friends. Install the program according to the instructions, following them carefully. When everything is set up, let it scan your entire computer until it finishes; it shall own the shit out of your spyware.

AVG Anti-Virus Free 8.5
If you’re like a lot of people, you probably have a trial version of a virus scanner such as Norton that has since expired and no longer updates itself to be up-to-date with the latest infections. A situation like this basically leaves your computer unprotected. If you don’t have an up-to-date anti-virus program, download AVG Free. Like the name says, it is a free program with constant automatic updates to ensure that it will always be aware of the latest viruses out there. I’ve been using it for years exclusively, and both of my PC’s stay virus-free.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
Lastly, for dealing with some of the more tricky infections such as malware and problems within your registry, download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. The free version doesn’t allow you to schedule scans, but you can manually run a scan whenever you want. I personally only run this one about once a month while Spybot and AVG run on schedules daily. If your computer is performing worse than it used to, running Malwarebytes’ will probably reveal an array of DEATH lurking on your computer, then it will rip it a new asshole and lube it up.

That’s about it, friends. Keeping these programs on your computer and running scans should be all you really need to stay safe from those dreaded viruses that Apple frequently reminds us they don’t have.

Susan Boyle

A fortnight ago, society mocked this woman based solely on visual perception.

Then they heard that voice, felt her passion; their shallow judgments were whisked out the window, replaced with regret and shame. All at once, they experienced in awe a glimpse of true beauty that trumped mere eyesight.

But time passed. Gradually her soul was eclipsed by her “ugly” shell once more, leading society to alter her image into something “pretty”; a rose-colored makeover for their shallow eyes.

Tragic.

LOST Prediction: The Purge (SPOILERS)

I’ve been watching LOST a lot over the past few months, starting with episode 1 and working my way up to the current episodes. Throughout the fifth season, I have started to get more of an understanding of what might eventually happen. Here’s what I think.

Earlier in the series, we learned that the Dharma Initiative would be all wiped out in a mass genocide led by Benjamin Linus. We got a brief look at all the bodies around the Dharma camp followed by Ben and others removing their gas masks.

Now that the show has progressed more, I’m beginning to think the deaths of the Dharma members was less tragic and more justified. I’d even go as far to say that the “hostiles” are actually the good guys.

In this week’s episode, we got a peek of how the main characters are adjusting to living in 1977 inside the Dharma compound. While Kate, Sawyer, Jack, Hurley, and Jin have all become members of Dharma, Sayid missed his chance and was instead captured for fear of being a hostile. The survivors of 815 were faced with a problem; they were all safe in their positions and would remain that way under one condition: Sayid must not tell his Dharma captors who he and the other survivors really are.

Unfortunately, as the episode progressed, we saw that Sayid was forced to eat a sugar cube that had a truth serum in it. He proceeded to tell the members of Dharma exactly who he and everyone else really were, but its level of unbelievability instead convinced them that they had given him too high of a dose and that he was going crazy.

Earlier in the show, we see a flashback to Sayid working on a construction site. Ben has tracked him down and wants Sayid to once again kill someone who is allegedly endangering his friends; a man sitting in a car monitoring Hurley at the mental hospital. We know from a past episode that Sayid does indeed kill this man, but in the current scene, he refuses to do it. Ben tells him that he was “born to kill”, that killing is his purpose. Sayid denies this adamantly and Ben simply apologizes and walks off.

Now, this moment was key. As we find out shortly after this scene, Sayid (after going back to the Island in 1977) escapes his captors and runs into Jin in the woods, who calls him by his name. Sayid immediately headbutts Jin and knocks him out to keep him from talking, but turns around and realizes that Young Ben has witnessed everything. He now knows that Jin and Sayid have a history, and that people in Dharma may indeed be associated with who they think is a hostile.

This is where Ben’s earlier words are important; when he told Sayid he was meant to kill. Sayid says “You were right… I am a killer.” and shoots Young Ben in the chest just before the episode ends.

Now, some people may think that history was just changed by killing Young Ben, but he clearly will not die. When Ben called Sayid a killer, it was for a reason. He told him that because he remembers Sayid shooting him when he was a little boy. He also remember Sayid saying “You were right, I am a killer”. Since Ben now knew that the survivors of 815 would end up going back in time to the 70’s at this point, he knew that he had to say that to Sayid to ensure that he would still be shot in 1977 as the flow of time intended. Every action that Ben orchestrates is done with the intention of making sure that everything in the flow of time happens exactly as it should. If he didn’t maintain his aura of obscurity and lack of trust, he would possibly end up influencing other people in the wrong way, causing them to take courses of action that were not meant to occur.

Ben is a good guy. He is saving the universe and the space-time continuum.

So now, almost 700 words later, I get to my theory about the purge. The other information was necessary to set this into motion.

We saw on an earlier episode that Young Ben wanted to leave Dharma and join the “hostiles” instead, possibly influenced by his abusive father. Here, he met Richard Alpert, the leader of the “hostiles” in the 1970’s who does not ever age under any circumstance in the show. I believe that Alpert has traveled back in time and will not age until he once again reaches the point he went back in time, but that is irrelevant right now. We know that Ben will later replace Richard as the leader of the “Hostiles”/”Others”, and apparently Richard does too. When Ben asks to join the “Hostiles”, Richard tells him he has to “be very patient”.

Combining this clip with others such as Ben killing his father in the VW Bus and the short clip of the aftermath of the purge, it becomes clear that Ben secretly divulges information and works as a mole in the Dharma camp under the watchful eye of Richard Alpert. This happens for a very long time, from the mid 1970’s until present day.

I believe that Sayid shooting Young Ben will eventually lead to the Purge. My guess is that in next week’s episode, Richard Alpert will find Young Ben in the woods and take him back to his camp to treat his gunshot wounds. This will be the beginning of Ben’s work as an inside man for the “hostiles”.

So, about that Purge. Why exactly would Ben and the “hostiles” orchestrate a mass genocide of everyone on the Dharma camp? After all, there was a truce between the two groups. In context, it appears that Ben is power-hungry and wants to overthrow the Dharma Initiative once and for all, but I would be willing to bet that there is much, much more to the situation than that. What if the Dharma Initiative’s outward appearance of a peaceful organization trying to preserve human life was just a cover for something bigger? Or at least became something bigger over the years? We know that the Initiative eventually discovered the key to time travel (we saw Dr. Chang talk about it in an earlier episode), so with that kind of power in their hands, there is no telling where their motives strayed.

The biggest clue about the Purge lies in the Tempest, a station built to produce deadly neurotoxins. Why would the Dharma Initiative, such a peaceful organization, build a station that does nothing but make deadly poison?

My guess is genocide. They wanted to completely wipe out the “hostiles”, who were on the Island long before Dharma arrived. Perhaps they felt that the truce had been broken. Perhaps their lust for power and domination got the best of them and they decided they no longer wanted to live alongside the “hostiles”? Or maybe it is bigger than that, perhaps they weren’t immediately planning on using the gas on the hostiles, but only had it stored just in case of an emergency.

Regardless, my guess is that the gas at the Tempest station was eventually going to be used to wipe out the “hostiles”. Unfortunately for the Dharma Initiative, they were unaware that Young Ben was fraternizing with the enemy. He knew about the gas and its production, and tipped off Richard Alpert about it and Dharma’s plans for it.

This is what causes the Purge. Ben and a team of others orchestrate a covert operation and wipe out the Dharma Inititiative with their own gas. Why? We still don’t know. It could be to kill the Dharma members before they killed the “hostiles”, but it could also be something a little bit more complex. Maybe Richard is indeed a time traveler and knows that something Dharma is working on could eventually have devastating effects on the world and aims to stop it.

We’ll never know for sure until it airs, but I’ve got my money on the Tempest station being used against Dharma.

It Came From YouTube, Volume I

While browsing YouTube, I came across a video that features Transformers star Shia LeBeouf running away from paparazzi. I hate paparazzi videos and most celebrities, but I was bored and my desire to see people’s lives being ruined got the best of me.

Anyway, as I scrolled through the comments, I found this little gem by a genius who goes by the alias of DatBitchBlu. It reads as follows:

“ok da paparazzi dont realize its not fuckin serious and dey aint gotta keep chasin sum1 4 a fuckin picture! idk dat even came bout! chasin sum1 wit a effin camera takin pix! so pointless! i would b bored of if! idc how much money dey get 4 it! u neva kno one day sum1 goin pretend 2 b a pap n actually hurt sum1 or worse…”

Absolutely masterful use of the English language. I can tell it is well above both my reading and writing levels, as I can’t begin to fathom what the last sentence is actually trying to tell me.

All I know now is that I am cold, depressed, and doubting myself as a writer. Why bother when there are true gents out there like the great DatBitchBlu?

Dream Log: Night of 3/2/09

I just had this really messed up dream that was very vivid. It also kept me asleep through my six morning alarms and caused me to miss class. It seemed to have some meaning to it, so I thought I would share it on WordPress to keep myself from forgetting it.

In this dream, I was in Dothan with three unidentifiable friends riding in my car with me. It was night time, and I think we had just left the Peanut Festival or some other event at the Dothan fairgrounds. It was very dark on the road, which was winding around through a fairly wooded area.

All of the sudden, I started to notice that I was passing cars on the road that weren’t using their headlights. Not just a few cars, but every car on the road had no lights on. In that area, they wouldn’t even have been able to see the street until my headlights illuminated it. In normal fashion, I flashed my headlights at them as they passed to signal them turn theirs on.

In the dream, I got so freaked out by the fact that no one was using their headlights that I failed to notice the giant roadblock in the road, plastered in big stop signs, barriers and cones. It looked like the roadblocks that keep you from entering new areas in the Grand Theft Auto games. Very strange. Before I hit them, I realized that my headlights weren’t illuminating them at all. As if my headlights had actually been off the entire time I was driving and I inexplicably could see the road.

Anyway, I locked up my brakes with little time to spare and (very realistically) I remember sliding into the road block, which smashed the front of the car and sent us spinning and flipping into the woods. After we got out of the totaled car (surreal seeing your own car totaled in a dream), my friends kept telling me that they could see the roadblock for miles, and that I was too busy flagging people down for not using their headlights to notice it. However, I kept telling them that my headlights didn’t illuminate it at all.

The crash felt so real in the dream, I could feel the g-force and the pain of flipping through the woods. I got a weird vibe from this dream, like it had some kind of meaning to it. Was I too absorbed in telling other people to drive safely and turn their lights on, causing me to not pay attention to my own driving? Were my headlights off just like the rest of the people on the road?

I feel like this dream was trying to tell me not to spend so much time pointing out the faults of others when I have plenty of my own, some of which could potentially be the very thing I’m pointing out to others. I suppose that would make me a hypocrit. But then again, I can’t think of anything like that at the moment to support that message. Dreams do come from the subconscious, so maybe I’m just hiding it from myself.

Or it could be completely random. I did watch an episode of Lost last night where Hurley found an old VW van, and with Charlie riding shotgun, he drove it down a hill toward some rocks blocking the path in an attempt to jump start the engine. Just as he cranked up the engine, he swerved with barely enough room to pass the rocks blocking his way, very similarly to how I hit the road block. Only my driving wasn’t as successful and I hit it.

Could it be related to Lost? Or could it be something my subconscious is trying to tell me? Who knows, but I haven’t had a dream that made me ponder so much in a long, long time.

Are you on Twitter yet?

As a fan of Web 2.0 and social media in general, I try to stay up-to-date with the latest sites that surface in this field. The most popular sites like Facebook and MySpace are where I stay in touch with people I know in everyday life (though MySpace is very seldom logged into anymore, I personally despise it), as pretty much everyone I’m acquainted with has an account at one or both of those sites.

However, sometimes I just want to engage in friendly conversation with people from all over the world without the hassle of all the frosting that comes along with Facebook/MySpace, such as the applications, notes, tagging photos, and the like. That’s where Twitter comes into play.

Twitter is a very simple but extremely powerful site that connects you to a vast amount of people. It revolves around one simple question: “What are you doing?”, followed by a text box that gives you 140 characters to describe what is currently going on in your life. You can type a simple sentence such as “I’m at school in the library.” or you can even post any web address as a link to show everyone and reply to others’ “tweets” (posts on Twitter). There are many other ways you can take advantage of that text space as well.

Many look at Twitter and wonder what the appeal is. They may look at the simple design and assume that it is merely Facebook with everything cut away but the status system. This is partially true, but not completely. When you update your Twitter profile, everyone who is “following” you will see it on their feed and can then reply to it or directly message you, sparking limitless conversations from anything you say. It’s delightfully addictive and the people you meet tends to span much further than the confines of your region of the world.

Another great thing about Twitter is that you can use it to promote your work when you have a lot of people following you. For instance, whenever I add a new post to my blog, I link to it in my Twitter status and fifty people instantly see it. To a greater extreme, my friend Adam Jackson has nearly 2,500 followers. Whenever he posts a link, you can imagine that Twitter most definitely helps with getting the attention of the public.

Even with the previously listed advantages of Twitter, the real reason I come back to it is because it is tons of fun, completely simple, not time consuming to update, and once again, addictive. I can update it from my phone via text messaging, the Twitter website, or straight from my desktop via a program called twhirl. In just seconds I can update my Twitter profile without even having to look at it.

I hope this blog post convinces at least a few people to join the site and give it a shot. With its huge burst of popularity, I’m shocked to see that only a few people I know in real life actually use it, especially considering how simple it is. I know a lot of people on Facebook who update their status in ways that just beg to be posted as tweets.

Hope to see you there!

Pardon the Dust

So I decided to jump from Blogger to WordPress. It seems like WordPress would be more efficient at getting me exposure to actual human beings, so I thought I would give it a shot. I’m not sure if I like the interface better or worse, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Anyway, I’m going to try to start writing more often than I have been, and I think now would be a better time than ever to start!

See you soon.

Let the great experiment begin!

Well, it’s been about 4 years since I lost all that weight in high school, and over that time I have gradually gained some back. I decided to start dieting again and running 3-5 times a week. I’m doing the Special K Diet loosely, which is eating a bowl of Special K for two meals, then eating a normal, but not exuberant dinner. I have been doing it for about a week and I can tell it’s already running. I’ve also been running two laps around my neighborhood on the weeknights.

My goal is to lose 20 pounds total at least, but ideally I would like to lose 25-30, bringing me down to 155-160 pounds. Wish me luck! I’ll keep the blog updated with my status.

Finally upgraded my cheap-ass Walmart PC

Over the Holidays, I found some great deals on new computer equipment on NewEgg.com and ended up picking up some stuff to put into my old PC. I hoped to give a little bit of gaming kick to get myself up to speed with the current generation of games; my PS2 was starting to lose its appeal.

I got 4GB of RAM and a GeForce 9800GT graphics card bundled with Call of Duty 4 for around $130.00 after rebates. When the package came in the mail, I frantically ripped open my PC and began to install these much-longed-for goodies.

The first thing I noticed was that I was literally one millimeter away from not having room for the GeForce. The thing is huge, and it just barely had enough clearance to slide into place. With a sigh of relief, I felt it slide down into place and lock.

Next up was the RAM. When I went to unclip the old RAM, I realized that the graphics card was so huge, the RAM clips actually touched it when they were closed, forcing me to remove the graphics card again in order to install my new RAM. Needless to say, this close call made me quite nervous. The GeForce literally could not have been any larger. If it had been, I would have wasted some serious cash.

Anyway, after I got everything finally secured into place, I closed everything up and plugged in the computer. The difference is like night and day. Suddenly I feel like it’s capable of doing what I want it to do. Logically, the first thing I did was install Call of Duty 4 to test out the new graphics card…

Wow.

It handled the game with flying colors. All options set to their absolute maximum, no problems at all. I couldn’t believe this horribly shitty PC was capable of being upgraded to smoothly. Before the upgrade, it could only play relatively old games at their lowest settings. And it did that in quite a shitty fashion.

So now I’m looking into new processors. That is the last thing on my list. Hopefully fairly soon I will be able to run games like Crysis and GTAIV smoothly at the higher settings. It’s been so long since I bought a new game console or had up-to-date equipment that I didn’t quite realize just how far gaming had come in the last few years. I have been blown away by the graphics, much like when I was 9 years old after plugging the N64 I bought with lawn mowing money for the first time.

I think I have had an epiphany.

You know that one event in your life that suddenly changes your mindset? The thing that makes you commit to living differently?

Well, I feel like I had one of those. But that’s it. I can’t actually name an event that would have caused this to happen, but I feel results, as if it did. Suddenly I’m a far more organized person. I have more control over my life and I feel like all of my thoughts are in the right place, out of nowhere. I’ve met some interesting new people. Even my taste in music instantly changed at some point. I feel like a different person in a lot of ways.

This has eventually led to being a happier person who is more satified with who he is, something I drastically needed. I just feel right for the first time in ages. Isn’t that weird?